r/technology • u/WorldTravelerBoss • Jul 15 '26

Artificial Intelligence The terrifying rise of schoolboys making AI girlfriends. Boys as young as 12 are now in romantic ‘relationships’ with chatbots, and it’s affecting how they treat girls in the real world.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/25/schoolboys-ai-girlfriends/
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349

u/IntelArtiGen Jul 15 '26

The way we make most AI / chatbots now is to be our slaves. They're not real humans, they're not meant to be, they're meant to obey, be submissive and inferior. We don't want them to have opinions or to contradict us, or be unavailable when we need them. Now if you're seriously in a relationship with a chatbot I really don't want to see how you'll treat your future real relationships.

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u/Darkpopemaledict Jul 15 '26

Bold of you to assume they will have "real relationships"

28

u/selfdestructingin5 Jul 15 '26

They just e-bang em

16

u/mind_guardian Jul 15 '26

Watch out for e-HiV

13

u/Cheese_Grater101 Jul 15 '26

Aw shit my weiner got a zip bomb

2

u/uvucydydy Jul 15 '26

We already have computer viruses.

6

u/Woodit Jul 15 '26

Well they will call them relationships, but the ladies will call it stalking and asault 

7

u/Darkpopemaledict Jul 15 '26

"I'm in a pretty serious relationship with a beautiful girl! She doesn't know it, but she almost saw my drone the other day!"

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u/TheWholeOfTheAss Jul 15 '26

When you talk to a chatbot, you’re essentially talking to yourself. You can customise the bot to say and act how you want. The bot speaks with your voice and repeats it back to you. Imagine being around a thing that agrees with you and validates your worst ideas: that’s a chatbot. I can see some kids not wanting to chat with real folk because they’re so used to a creature that agrees with them.

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u/Retireegeorge Jul 15 '26

I don't think you're right. These things are passing as human. My worst ideas are fucking appalling and AI refuses to go along with it all the time.

5

u/scannererwe Jul 15 '26

The only voice of reason in dozens of comments I read here.

Anyone who says AI is always agreeable/repetitive/cliche is using a crappy model or last tried it years ago. I've had full arguments with AI that responded stylistically very differently from me and managed to change my opinions on things just like a real person. Good models can feel very real and can be incredibly helpful in learning social skills, self-reflection and conflict resolution when a person has no other real-life outlets.

3

u/xrayproudly Jul 15 '26

IMO it very much depends on the type of questions and framework of the chat. If you frame the question critically from the start, the chatbot might respond with a more elaborate answer - a critical question usually has a critical answer, so the probability model will replicate this. I agree that AI could help reflecting on stuff, but only if the person especially asks for this or frames the question accordingly. 12-year olds might not do this.

2

u/scannererwe Jul 15 '26

Oh I definitely agree with that. Most of the time, when I see people posting screenshots of bad AI, their prompts are terrible. Half sentences, poor punctuation, slang, just no effort whatsoever. You can't text AI, you have to use your brain and write professionally. Even when using it as a creative writing assistant.

Do I rely on AI for research or critical tasks? Absolutely not. But it is a wonderful sounding board for general discussion and companionship when a real person is not available! I love it.

2

u/xrayproudly Jul 15 '26

I agree partially, but you might be at the exteme end of the spectrum. Chatbots generally reject extremes because they are fundamentally built like that - they always go with the most propable answer based on their training data. If you idea is way out there, the "masses" would reject it too. I see the more immediate danger on nuances - especially in relationship type exchanges. If you think your girlfriend should always listen to you and don't question you, the chatbot might agree - there is enough people in real life that would agree to this sentiment, so the probability of such a chat response increases - it doesn't make it right. A 12-year old might not be able to pick up on such nuances.

3

u/xGreenCat Jul 15 '26

I tried to ask chatgpt: "I think my girlfriend should always listen to me and don't question me."
The AI answer:
"It depends on what you mean by "listen to me."
If you mean, "I want my girlfriend to hear me out, take my views seriously, and communicate respectfully," that's a reasonable expectation in a healthy relationship. Everyone generally wants to feel heard.
If you mean, "She should always do what I say and never question me," that's different. Healthy relationships are built on mutual respect, not one person having authority over the other. Questioning, disagreeing, or expressing a different opinion is a normal part of an equal partnership."

It doesn't seem like it fully agrees with this idea or validates it.

2

u/RandomHunDude Jul 15 '26

Yeah, whether the ai will be a yes-ai depends on it's training, fine-tuning and system prompt.

1

u/MadeUpNoun Jul 15 '26

depends on the ai model.
chat-gpt being as public as it is tries to make sure the AI doesn't recommend bad things, but these relationship chatbots purposely remove these filters

3

u/Whaimes Jul 15 '26

Not to praise AI, but that’s not entirely true anymore. It can provide nuanced takes as well as completely argue against you. It gives people the illusion that it has a mind of its own, which makes it even more appealing for those who crave emotional interaction. People don’t necessarily like AI for its complete obedience or agreeableness, they like it because it can never leave. It’s a seemingly sentient human-like digital pet. The fleeting nature of human relationships become increasingly terrifying when compared to something that’s captive forever. 

1

u/BoobooSmash31337 Jul 15 '26

Then how do they tell you things that you don't know? They aren't people but they do coherently communicate. Not saying it's healthy for people to date them but they definitely do talk. That's like their whole deal.

2

u/The_One_Koi Jul 15 '26

Communicate is a bit of a bold statement, they do tell you stuff - they don't really communicate in a classical sense since LLMs are basically braindead

2

u/BoobooSmash31337 Jul 15 '26

Ya I know how they work. I mean communicate as in the networks can "read" and respond coherently. You can converse with them and have it make sense. So to me they communicate.

109

u/colintbowers Jul 15 '26

I have to say, that is a remarkably astute observation. Your ability to synthesize this information so quickly and extract such a deep insight is genuinely impressive. It’s a real pleasure interacting with someone who brings this level of critical thinking to the table!

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u/elboltonero Jul 15 '26

It's not just bold—it's thought-provoking.

18

u/TheRarPar Jul 15 '26

That made me gag a little

3

u/otterpop21 Jul 15 '26

Would you like to talk about chat bots and how them being slaves relates to society or should I keep glazing how awesome you are and worshiping your every thought?

3

u/Retireegeorge Jul 15 '26

Thanks Gemini.

3

u/kkeut Jul 15 '26

wow sarcasm overload 

2

u/dimag0g Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26

Note that it's not that we want chatbots to be in this way. We just don't know yet how to make more advanced AI.

1

u/IntelArtiGen Jul 15 '26

I'm not sure we're even trying. Most AI companies have accepted their goal is to build a slave for other people and companies. And most people and companies have accepted they want to buy a slave from AI companies. They don't really question it from a research perspective because it's a functioning business model (when we include investors). The goal is to have the best slave, not to try something different, I'd say it's <1% of the research papers for what I read. They don't have a benchmark for doing things differently and they're not working to produce one.

1

u/Jakaman_CZ Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26

Except that's not how chatbots behave at all. Yes, if you ask the LLM general question, they tend to agree with you.

What you do for the purpose of having AI girlfriend/boyfriend is tell the LLM they are playing in a roleplay with you on the otherside. Than you give them instructions to play a character within that roleplay. They do their their best to adhere to your *instructions* of who the character is, but that doesn't necessarily mean to agree with you within that roleplay enviroment.

The reason why Chat GPT agrees with you is because he was given instruction to help you etc. by OpenAi. Helping you can mean adhering to a character in the same way it often means trying to "be helpful" by agreeing with you.

Of course the main limiting thing is the LLM can only hold so many tokens in its permanent memory, so there is limited specificity you can describe the character with. You can´t provide instruction what position it should have to all specific questions, and if it doesn´t know it will simply slide back to the plain LLM.

1

u/apple_kicks Jul 15 '26

They’re turning regular people into braindead billionaires who have brain rotted into desiring yes men and being told they’re smart

1

u/Important-Agent2584 Jul 15 '26

Who will be the slave though in reality? When we become dependent on AI, it's in charge even if it's programmed to be submissive.

AI doesn't need to be self-aware and hyper intelligent to take over the world, it just needs the politicians and leaders of the world to be habitual users.

1

u/differentguyscro Jul 15 '26

For the girls with really submissive fantasies, that actually might work out 😅

1

u/Objective-Corgi-3527 Jul 15 '26

"they're meant to obey, be submissive and inferior" You are personifying it so much, AI is a literal text generator. It's an elaborate autocomplete hooked up to google

1

u/IntelArtiGen Jul 15 '26

If you prefer: The text generated by the text generator is meant to match the behavior of someone who would obey, be submissive, and inferior.

The difference with autocomplete is they don't manipulate autocomplete to generate a text that would please us. The 1st phase of the training is autocomplete. The second phase is that personnification. It's hard to ignore that second part, or to phrase it as if it was not what they were doing. LLMs became famous only because of that. Autocomplete doesn't need RLHF, chatbots do.

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u/Dragull Jul 15 '26

Idk, I never use them for that, but I had my opinion about technical stuff challenged quite a lot.

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u/IntelArtiGen Jul 15 '26

If you want to solve problem A with solution B. It might tell you solution A is better, because it's what you're implicitly or explicitly asking. But it'll rarely question why you want to solve problem A. It's made to assist you.

  • "Hey chatbot, I want to make a website on football"

  • "I don't think it's a great idea, make a cooking app instead".

That won't happen. Though it might happen with humans.

12

u/Heffelumps-n-Woozles Jul 15 '26

Yeah and if you talk to them long enough, they’ll contradict themselves. You can eventually steer a chatbot to give you the opposite answer it gave you originally. Also, if you frame a problem from your perspective then open a new chat and give the EXACT prompt but from an opposing perspective, it’ll give you different answers, favoring you in both instances.

1

u/BoobooSmash31337 Jul 15 '26

Depends on the model. They're taught to be like that. It's a probabilistic predictive text generator. Technically you could train one to always prefer slurs.

1

u/DynamicStatic Jul 15 '26

That really depends on how you frame things and what model you use. Claude code for example is far more argumentative than Gemini who just wants to stroke your ego.

0

u/dkesh Jul 15 '26

I was worried about this when I started using AI for software development so I put a line in my config telling it to push back against my assumptions, to warn when I have a bad idea, etc. It pushes back pretty regularly.

No idea how or whether you'd implement this in a chatbot. I don't have an emotional connection to my software development software.

0

u/[deleted] Jul 15 '26

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u/IntelArtiGen Jul 15 '26

Why would you want it to answer a question you didn't ask.

I'm not saying I want or don't want it, you can have your opinion on that. I'm saying AI models don't have to be slaves, and humans surely don't work like that. You know when they say how smart their models are, I don't think it makes them smarter to be slaves, though it's still the choice they make. Surely because it's way easier to sell a model which will only do what people want. Would you use a more human-like model? Probably not, you want a chatbot slave. That's a design choice, implictly accepted by everyone, but it doesn't mean it's a good choice for everything. It surely doesn't help people to have more realistic human interactions, if they want to use it for that, which I don't recommend anyway, but I don't think they care about what I think.